Finance Minister Winston Jordan yesterday rebuffed criticisms of his proposed $230B national budget by the opposition PPP/C, which he accused of deliberately misleading the public to stymie development and derail efforts at building national unity.
“It is the strategy to put these claims out there so you waste your energies explaining and all other things that need to be done get left but I won’t fall into that trap… at the end of five years the people of Guyana don’t want to know who won a budget debate, they want to know what you have done for them. It is by your works that you will be judged,” he declared.
As he stood to “wind up” the five days of debate in the National Assembly, Jordan questioned if the opposition’s presentations of “doom, gloom and scaremongering tactics” could not have been more focused, constructive and stimulating. Though he declared that he would not be presenting a rebuttal, Jordan spent an hour and a half repelling the varied criticisms that had been presented by the opposition Members of Parliament.
Jordan sought to correct claims about announced budget measures on motor vehicles, tyres and tax compliant licencing.
The proposed restriction on the importation of vehicles over eight years excludes heavy duty vehicles, such as trucks and vehicles used in agriculture, he said, while specifying that it applies only to motor cars and SUVs.
Additionally, he said there has been no ban on used tyres, but there has been a notice of intent to ban them. When this ban comes in to being, it too will only apply to motor cars and SUVs, he added.
Finally, the new tax compliance requirement for the issuance of licences, he noted, only applies to those licences granted under the Tax Act, such as hotel and liquor licences, and not driver and motor vehicle licences, which are granted under the Motor Vehicle and Road Traffic Act.
The minister accused the opposition of challenging these budget provisions as part of a strategy to distract.
‘Unsubstantiated’
He stressed that while everyone is entitled to their own opinion, they are not entitled to their own facts. “In this House, several members have been guilty of trotting out unsubstantiated figures,” he said. He referred to former Minister of Legal Affairs Anil Nandlall, who claimed that the Lottery Fund had a $28B balance it has never held since its establishment. He went on to quote the balance over the period of 2011 to 2015. There was $853M in 2011, $1B in 2012, $1.1B in 2013, $1.4B in 2014 and after a transfer of $1B to the consolidated fund $0.5B in 2015.
“Not only did the member know that it was a blatantly false assertion he was making, but it is becoming the norm in the house to make such claims,” Jordan said. He noted that this tactic of misrepresentation is being consistently used by a certain newspaper aligned with the opposition. This newspaper, he noted, is in the habit of failing to provide retractions when corrected and he charged that the opposition was now bringing these practices into the House.
Jordan flayed the opposition speakers, including Leader of the Opposition Bharrat Jagdeo, for “playing to the gallery.”
“It may be that they are going through the motions for the sake of their constituents. I got that distinct impression from the Leader of the Opposition,” Jordan said. He claimed that the parliamentarians have become their own worse enemies as they “continue to bob and weave, attack and counterattack and play to the gallery, especially now that there is live television, radio and wider social media coverage of these debates.”
“We continue to engage in old talk rather than focus on budget 2016,” he added, while citing contentions about the Amaila Falls project as an example.
‘Inherited’
Jordan also addressed the opposition’s repeated claims that the 2015 and 2016 budgets consisted almost solely of “repackaged PPP projects.”
“You can’t just come in and dump projects already begun, for which loan funds have already been expended. What is wrong with these projects for which they borrowed money—big money that we have to pay back—being continued and finished by this government? What is wrong with completing those projects that are taking up the fiscal space? We cannot bring our projects in because we inherited all of these projects, many of which have huge problems,” he said.
He referenced the project to expand the Cheddi Jagan International Airport (CJIA), for which the contractor has already been advanced half the contract sum, US$65M, yet that project had to be restarted because the work had not been done.
He also noted the US$4.2M which had been paid to Surendra Engineering to build a Speciality Hospital. The company was later found to have defrauded the government of Guyana.
Jordan also addressed complaints about the reviews of various taxes and he stressed that Guyanese cannot want first class services at peppercorn rates.
The rates and taxes, which have not been reviewed in 20 years, need to be re-evaluated if residents want better services, he said. Using himself as an example, he noted that as a resident of South Ruimveldt he pays about $8,000 in taxes, “a sum that he said you can’t even pay a grass cutter to cut your grass but you are demanding services for the city for that amount.”
Local government authorities, he added, must finance themselves but they can’t do it with 1995 taxes in 2016.
He also noted that the planned increases in licencing fees are not intended to bring in large sums of revenue but to upgrade a system which was outdated, with the paper in some cases costing more than the licence.
The minister quoted the report of the tax reform committee, which said that “there is need for greater buoyancy in the tax system, since revenue as a share of GDP has not risen very appreciatively in several decades.”
